Any Way It's Measured, Tesla's $5B 'Gigafactory' Is Huge : The Two-WayThe electric-car company wants to build a massive plant in the U.S. to churn out 500,000 vehicle batteries a year. That's more than the combined current production at all the factories in the world.

-- There's surely going to be stiff competition from the four states that Tesla says are its finalists to be the factory's location: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Bloomberg News says there's going to be "a bidding war."

-- This huge investment is one of the keys, analysts say, to Tesla's effort to keep cutting the cost of its cars, which now start at $71,000. It's hoping to debut a model that retails for about $40,000 sometime next year.

As veteran auto writer Micheline Maynard writes for Forbes, Tesla founder Elon Musk is "taking on a manufacturing project that might give pause to companies with much more experience." She also notes, though, that "whether it's shooting rockets into space, or building a $70,000 electric luxury car ... Musk has never shied away from a challenge."